At 02:05 PM 6/4/2007, you wrote:
John Ostrom asked me to do just that shortly before the Ostrom
symposium several years ago. If I remember correctly, some quickly
done flapping calculations indicated that it sould be capable of
decent flapping flight performance given a pectoral mass fraction of
roughly about 7% (about half that of a typical modern bird). It
didn't glide too well -- about 2/3 the gliding performance of a
pigeon unless the tail was cascadable, in which case performance
would have been substantially improved. I have no idea whether the
tail was cascadable though. I also did some rather elementary
launch calculations that convinced me that it would be able to
launch from the ground without significant difficulty (though I
didn't buy into the Burger [sp??] ground effect vs. speed hypothesis).
Any chance of a paper being published on this?